When my grandmother died, I had a rather odd experience.

Now mind you, this was an intensely sad event for my family and me, but--she was 90 years old at the time, had a lived an extraordinary life, and really had only experienced a precipitous decline in her health and quality of life in the last month of it. Would that we could all be so lucky.

So yes, I grieved; yes, I was sad. Inwardly, for a long time (and still), but outwardly for only a couple of hours. And the rest of the family took pretty much the same tack, at least as far as I could tell, such that by the time visitation at the funeral home came about, we were really in pretty good spirits. We greeted the people that came by, thanked them for their kind words, and then--we caught up with the living. Really, it was a pretty relaxed social occasion. There were jokes and chuckles and stories and all that.

And if you knew my family--and (especially) if you'd known her--you would realize that not only was this OK, but that it was entirely appropriate. After all, she was ours and she wouldn't have had it any other way.

So I was a bit perplexed when a woman I'd never seen in my entire life came in and began to weep and wail loudly and uncontrollably. All the more so when I looked to my mom, my uncle, and anyone else in the room who might know just who she was, and realized that they were just as confused as I was.

To this day I'm really not sure what her connection was to my grandmother. I'm sure that my grandmother had touched her life in some way. But still, I found myself in the rather odd position of wanting very badly to ask her to pipe down with her mourning of someone whom I had known and adored for 28 years.

My point here is that grief does, in a way, belong to certain people. To family, to friends, to the those that feel the loss in a very real and proximate way. Sharing in the various sorrows of the world may seem like the sensitive thing to do, but in some cases it can actually be very much the opposite.

I'm just sayin'.